Monthly archive: June, 2013

Mexico at the Hour of Combat: Sabino Osuna’s Photographs of the Mexican Revolution is both a new book as well as a travelling exhibition based on the Sabino Osuna Collection of 427 glass negatives of the Mexican Revolution, held at the Special Collections section of the University of California, Riverside. The collection mainly covers the period 1910 to 1914 although little is known about the principal photographer, Sabino Osuna. Evidence suggests that he was a commercial photographer in Mexico City, whose work shifted from portraiture and architectural studies to photo history when the Revolution began. The book, edited by Ronald Chilcote (Professor Emeritus in Economics at UC Riverside) and published by Laguna Wilderness Press, provides striking images of the Mexican Revolution that are unique and largely unknown.

We deplore the recent crackdown of the Turkish government on its own citizens, the clearly unjustified use of tear gas, acts of force, gas canisters and smoke bombs that have resulted in a vast number of injuries, imperiling the lives of those who seek to exercise their basic freedoms of assembly and protest. This assault of the Turkish government on its own people constitutes an attack on democratic principles and a departure from legitimate methods of governance — we unequivocally oppose such tactics of intimidation and state violence. In the name of democratic principles, we call upon the Turkish government to cease these violent actions immediately. We affirm the aims of the popular resistance to the privatisation of public space, to the growing authoritarian rule dramatically instantiated by this objectionable display of state violence, and the preservation of public rights of protest. We call upon the government to (a) stop the beating of all protesters and those in the media who seek to represent their point of view, including lawyers and journalists; (b) cease obstructing access to medical care for the injured; (c) put an end to the practice of unlawful detention and sequestering of protesters, medical personnel and legal counsel and (d) facilitate access to medical care and legal representation for those injured by the police. We call for the immediate end to this appalling state violence and we reaffirm the rights of popular dissent and resistance, the right to have access to a media uncensored by governmental powers, and the right to move and speak freely in public space as preconditions of democratic life.

The attention recently granted to the Grand Renaissance dam in Ethiopia, costing more than $4.3bn, forming Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant and raising controversy with Egypt over access to the waters of the river Nile poses anew some questions of geopolitical economy surrounding multipurpose dam construction. There is no better way to learn about such issues than to explore similar, but also specific, in depth studies on social movement struggle in contesting and resisting large-scale built-environment projects. With that aim in mind, my attention here turns to one of the most significant books to appear recently on struggles over dispossession and resistance, focusing on the series of dams constituting the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) in the Narmada Valley, India, and social movement processes in struggling against exploitation, displacement, and everyday violence.

The seesaw of uneven development in Turkey under neoliberal restructuring has led to unprecedented recent growth. After a sharp contraction in 2009, the economy has been in the top three of the G20 club for rapid growth, the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2010 was 8.9 percent, nominal wage growth has hit 18 percent a year, domestic demand is rising by approximately 25 percent, and credit growth is between 30 percent and 40 percent. Perhaps in order to absorb the surplus value that capitalism perpetually produces in the search for ever more profit, urbanisation and public works projects in Turkey have continued at a rapid pace. But can the rise and rise of neoliberalism in Turkey be adequately understood through a focus on the hegemony of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP)?

In picking up on my earlier post on the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico and the discussion of Sybille Bedford, my attention now turns to Aldous Huxley. Recent controversy has been rightly raised due to the bulldozing of a 2,300 year-old Mayan pyramid in Belize at the Nohul complex, close to the border with Mexico (pictured). As reported in the Guardian, Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Professor in Archaeology at Boston University, has stated that ‘I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived’, including Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. It is a landscape that Huxley surveyed himself in Beyond the Mexique Bay [1934], chillingly commenting on the choice betweens pyramids or progress, the latter defined in the modern form of personal liberty. He even surmised that ‘there are enough bricks in the Cholula pyramid [Mexico] to cover an area twice as large as the Place de la Concorde to a depth to twice the height of the Louvre’. To paraphrase Paco Ignacio Taibo II, it seems that Aldous Huxley should have avoided writing on Mexico and carried on with those dystopian novels he wrote so well.